How the mind-bending Op-art has influenced fashion
Good clothes ought to be stared at and puzzled over for hours. Picture your Gran with a Magic Eye book circa 1993.
Understandable then, that designer Riccardo Tisci looked to Optical Art this season at Givenchy, to encourage us to stare ourselves silly at his finely crafted wares. New silhouette trousers with higher waists and bagged-out hips came in monochromatic checks and stripes; dresses and jackets zig-zagged like waves on an oscilloscope one minute, and spiralled like ambient screensavers the next.
Op-art reached the public eyes through the work of 1930s poster designer Victor Vasarely, whose Zebras is the first example of the throbbing and protean black-and-white etchings. He was followed by Bridget Riley, whose work in the Sixties brought the movement into the fashion world, where it was taken up by the likes of Mary Quant, John Bates and Paper Caper.
It is the juxtaposition of tone and dimension, and the manipulation of graphic reality that creates the pseudo life form of an Op-art piece. And this is what Tisci strives for in his spring collection: sinuous graphic lines mirror the fluidity of the bunched tulle with which he decorates tops and skirts; they give an unreal depth and weight to even the gauziest of fine chiffon and silk; they relax Tisci’s body-conscious silhouette as much as his idiosyncratic pattern-cutting does.
Prada – who else? – veered towards Op-Art in her S/S08 show, with skewed tartan-esque checks which gave trousers the shape and definition with print that normally comes with cut. Alexander McQueen too, for S/S09, showed monochrome dresses with X-ray hourglass figures bleeding across the front on them, while Alaïa and Hervé Léger, Kings of Cling both, mastered the power of Op-Art techniques to define, create and re-invent curves.
In the spirit of the current Nineties revival, it’s exactly like Magic Eye - except nowhere near as naff.
Harriet Walker is a fashion writer at The Independent
Zoë Taylor has appeared in Le Gun, Bare Bones, Ambit and Dazed & Confused. She is currently working on her third graphic novella and an exhibition
